Tonight, while watching TV with Hubby, we saw an ad for a brand of yougurt which was encouraging women to mail in the lids to the company, who would make a donation to a breast cancer fund.
Seeing all of the women licking the lids in the commercial, I suddenly had a vision of an employee with plastic gloves opening envelopes. “They can’t really count those things,” I said to Hubby. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. Think about paying employees to open germy envelopes and count those things by hand . . .”
“They probably don’t,” Hubby replied. He told me that he had heard at work about a similar promotion. He said a female co-worker had dilligently saved and mailed in the lids to the company, only to discover that the envelopes were quietly thrown away unopened. The company simply donated the million-or-so dollars that they had commited.
Something about this doesn’t sit right with me. If the same thing is going on with the company whose commercial I saw, I feel that they’re falsely giving the consumer the impression that the size of the donation is dependent on their purchases.
Giving to charity is laudable, and I don’t have a problem with companies bragging about it in order to boost sales, but if it’s true that the lids are worthless, it seems more like a sales gimmick than a charity drive. They’re tricking the consumer into buying a product because they think it will help women suffering from breast cancer.
How did this lady discover that? Our school does soup lables, and we get a refund, so someone must have some way of doing it. Maybe it’s by weight, but they don’t just thow them away and pay us anything.
I honestly don’t know, nor do I know which campaign she was referring to specifically. It can’t be Yoplait’s campaign, because they have internet tracking on each lid donation.
Breast Cancer Action finds fault with Yoplait’s campaign, even though it does seem they do count the lids.
Since I don’t have the details about the campagn my husband’s co-worker described, the question becomes rhetorical. If you found that they did not count the lids, would it bother you as a consumer?